Advice for Editors

So farewell, then, to the sainted Richard Ingrams, whose weekly column for The Independent (UK) has been eased into the pond like an old Studebaker. Ingrams is sanguine about the closing sign being hung since he's had a venerable run as a regular jotter, having done a column (first for the Observer, then for the Indy) since 1988, the year Kylie Minogue's first album appeared.

I am unaware of Ingrams' feelings toward Kylie, whether he feels about her as I do, but that's neither here nor there.

In his valedictory column, Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye and current editor of The Oldie, has some tonic advice for his colleagues in the stricken battleships of print publication:

I have been especially lucky in that, unlike many
of my fellow columnists, I have hardly ever been lent on by my editors
or instructed what I should or should not write about...

As
for the readers, I have always thought they should be ignored. One of
the great mistakes newspapers have made in recent years is to work on
the assumption that with the help of market researchers and focus groups
they can discover what their readers want. But readers don't know what
they want until they get it. As Claud Cockburn once put it: "An editor
has no business worrying himself sick about what the public want. He
should be thinking about perfecting and producing what he wants and then
making the public want it too."

The problem with focus groups, whether in a conference room with a one-way mirror or one of those Frank Luntz watermelon pickings after a political debate, is that they say what they think they should think, or what they think others think they should think, generating a generic, consensus mush that serves as a guidance system for further committee-think and OCD tweaking of every trivial detail. So much fear rules the media world that defensive crouching and sticking to the familiar have become endemic, nearly everyone unable to have any fun anymore. And once the enjoyment's gone, it's so hard to get it back.